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As you may know I wrote my master’s thesis about lexical influence of Iranian languages on Lezgi. One of Iranian loanwords in Lezgi, гада [gada] ‘a boy; a young man’ starts to look interesting when you compare it with Persian گدا [gada] ‘a beggar’.

Do you -when speaking in Lezgi- address unknown or elder people by vun or kyn?

I have written earlier that Lezgi, like other Caucasian languages, doesn’t have a special ‘respect’ form (like French vous or German Sie or Russian Vy) but that appears to be correct only in the historical sense (ie. Lezgi acquired the distinction relatively recently and under influence of Russian).

As you perhaps recall, in one of the previous posts I have listed various verbal forms used in Lezgi. They were many, but they were not all there is. In the upcoming series of short posts I will deal with the remaining forms and meanings.

For a start the “going to” or immediate future form. Its ending is -dajwal added to the imperfect stem of the verb (eg. qachudajwal ‘going to take’; ghidajwal ‘going to bring’ zhedajwal ‘going to be’).

This form is usually used with forms of the verb “to be”, as in following examples:

Gila kyn chi chkadal zhedajwal ja = Now, you are going to be in our place.

I xabar adaz c’iji ymyr ghidajwal ja = This news is going to bring him a new life

With past forms of ‘to be’ it corresponds to the English “was going to…”

Za waz ewer gudajwal tir = I was going to call you

Qe chun ekskursijadiz fidajwal tir, amma marf qwana = We were going to go for a trip today, but it started to rain

I have already said a bit about Lezgi pronunciation, but unfortunately nothing about the placement of stress in Lezgi words. Let’s fill that gap now.

General information

Lezgi stress is dynamic, that is the stressed syllable is pronounced a bit longer and louder than the other parts of the word. Stress usually falls on the second syllable of the root, but many Arabic and Turkish loanwords are stressed on the last syllable and Russian loanwords often retain their original stress. Some case-forming and word-forming suffixes are always stressed, some others are not. There are also some other exceptions. See below for details (sorry for not including Cyrillic at this stage – I will update the post later). I will mark stress by putting the stressed vowels in capitals.

This is yet another post on Lezgi verbs. I feel it is needed, because a thorough knowledge of the Lezgi verbal forms is needed if one wants to achieve a minimal level of proficiency in Lezgi. On the surface it looks plain and simple, as Lezgi verbs don’t inflect (change) for person, gender and number, but once you take a closer look, you see that there is a bewildering variety of forms, some of them quite unfamiliar (so-called ‘converbs’ for instance.

I will start with listing (as always with the help of Haspelmath’s grammar) all main forms of the verb fin ‘to go’. Later on I will add explanations and examples to this list, for now let’s just marvel at how many different forms are there. Sorry for all the big grammar words, I’ll try to explain them later.

Converbs are verbal forms used in complex sentences and demanded by the sentence structure and other verbs being used. Apart from the ones mentioned above there are also some endings which create other converb forms:

If you read carefully one of the previous posts, entitled “Lezgi syntax trivia” you may have noticed that the sentences with the verb ‘to see’ looked a bit strange. I’ll repeat them now for the record:

What’s so strange about them? The fact that they seem to be constructed “backwards”. The noun representing the person who sees has an ending while the noun representing the person who is seen stands in its dictionary form.

That’s because a certain set of verbs, mainly related to perception, but also to feelings, behave in Lezgi in a peculiar way. You may think of Lezgi way of saying “the boy saw the girl” as something along the lines of “to the boy the girl was seen”. More adequately, you can compare this with syntax of the verb “to like” in many languages (cf. Italian mi piace and Russian мне нравится).

Incidentally, the Lezgi verb ‘to like’ – кIан (you’ve met it before, it means also ‘to love’ and ‘to want’) uses the same arrangement, so Рушаз гада кIанзава means “the girl loves the boy” and not the other way around.

There’s a group of verbs formed with the aid of verb атун ‘to come’ using this construction.
хъел атун ‘to be angry’ – адаз хъел атанва ‘he is angry’ lit. ‘anger has come to him’
шел атун ‘to feel like crying’
гьайиф атун ‘to be sorry; to regret’
хъвер атун ‘to be happy; to feel like laughing’
хуш атун ‘to be glad about something; to like something’

Lastly, this construction is used in verbs made from adjectives like гишин ‘hungry’ or мекьи ‘cold’

The lands inhabited by Lezgis have been either a part of or a neighbour of Iranian empires since the times of Caucasian Albania. The oldest town in this part of the Caucasus, Derbent / Darband / دربند was founded as an Iranian border fortress and, in the course of history, many Iranians were settled in its environs where their descendants the Tats and the Mountain Jews live even today.

Even though the picture of Lezgi – Iranian relations is not all rosy, given that the rise of the militantly Shi’a Safavid dynasty started a 300-year period of periodic warfare between the Sunni mountaineers and the Shi’a Iranian state, a lot of the cultural heritage remains shared. Iranian poets are cherished (and translated into Lezgi!) by the Lezgis even today, the folktales show many paralells, the same games are played, the same stories are told and lastly, there’s a good number of Iranian words which made their way into Lezgi and, by large, are not even perceived as foreign by native speakers.

As my master’s thesis touched upon this subject (ie. Iranian loanwords in Lezgi) and as the matter is not well-known may be of some interest to Lezgi readership, I will dedicate a couple of post to those words. For now, some general points:

There’s at least a thousand identifiably Iranian words in current usage.

Most of the loans can be traced back to Persian, but some display characteristics suggestive of a different source language – in many cases dialects of Tati spoken in the area.

While some words came directly from Persian, the majority was borrowed through Azerbaijani (ie. Azerbaijanis borrowed from Persians and Lezgis borrowed from Azerbaijani).

Sometimes there are interesting changes of meaning, in many cases a given word has one meaning in Persian and a slightly different one in Azerbaijani and Lezgi. This supports the argument of a said word being borrowed via Azerbaijani and not directly.

While some loanwords must have been borrowed many centuries ago, the bulk of them, in my opinion, was introduced into Lezgi relatively recently, when interactions with Azerbaijanis increased.

Elsewhere I am talking about ways to use a flashcard program ANKI to help with language learning (what it does is basically it shows you a word and you have to remember its translation correctly; it is a great help in remembering; you can download it for free from here).

Now, the main news is that ANKI lets you share your collections (“decks”) of words & translations with other people, which is precisely what I did with my Lezgi deck. To get it, first download and install ANKI program, then open it, click “Download” and search for “lezgi-english” in the list of the available shared decks. All in all there’s around 1600 words in my deck, but I will be updating and expanding it.

Заз лезги чIалал рахаз чириз кIанзава – I want to learn to speak Lezgi
Захъ галаз лезги чIалал рахух – Speak with me in Lezgi
Им лезгидалди кхьихь – Write it down in Lezgi
Идаз лезгидалди гьикI лугьуда? – How do they call it in Lezgi?
Лезги чIалал им гьикI я (жеда)? – Lit. what is it (will be) in Lezgi? ie. How is it called in Lezgi?
Ада вуч лугьузва? – What is he/she saying?
И гафунин мана вуч я? – What does this word mean? (lit. what is this word’s meaning?)

Notes:
1. лезги чIалал ‘on Lezgi language ie. in Lezgi’ and лезгидалди ‘from the top of Lezgi ie. the Lezgi way’ are interchangeable and have the same meaning. For other languages, just substitute a language name as appropriate (урус чIалал – in Russian; фарс чIалал – in Persian; поляк чIалал – in Polish etc.)

2. The translations may seem quite direct and even blunt to the average English speakers. In particular, the lack of the word ‘please’ in requests may raise some eyebrows. But its omission is not a mistake. The traditional Lezgi culture, like many other Caucasian cultures, is very egalitarian and not keen on formalities. That is all men are equal to each other and speak directly and up to the point. For instance, in Lezgi, there is no form of polite addrees (like the French “Vous” or German “Sie”).

This is not to say that the Lezgi culture doesn’t value politeness… On the contrary, politeness, respect and good manners are extremely important, it’s only that they are displayed in general behaviour and not necessarily in using flowery (often meaningless) words.

An illustrative anecdote read at a Caucasian forum:

Q: “How do you say ‘please’ as in ‘could you please bring me a cup of tea’ ?”
A: “In our culture and society, there’s a strict hierarchy. Everybody knows who should bring tea for whom. We don’t need words for that.”